To Think Pure Quality and the stupid. A note

What does it mean to think pure quality? It would mean thinking outside quantity. Outside of any quantity and of all processes of quantification.

It would not mean to think better. I don't want to puff up thought any more than it already is. And mine not at all.

Outside the window I just saw the brilliant blue, admiral blue, of a kingfisher's wings. I think it's still there. Sitting on the banana palm—a flash of blue, admiral, yes, going by the colour chart. And still I see it...

It would mean, although I'm tempted to say that Bergson tried, to think outside the society of authors. And despite Heidegger trying after him, but in terms of authentic thought, to do it too. Heidegger who Deleuze and Guattari put in his place when they agree that thought is rare.

I am outside it anyway. Writing here. Beckett's favourite, perfect sentence in St. Augustine, Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned; do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. And Brecht's schlummes Denken: it might also mean being an incompetent in thought.

Deleuze's own stupidity is the enemy of thought is double-edged. More dangerous than evil, says Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At least in evil lies the germ of its—like a small extract of the poison—overthrow.

Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bonhoeffer whose name has something like good-hoper going on in it. Hope too, thought to be double-edged, stupid that is, if you wanted to survive the camps (the source escapes me). Deleuze's is a practice in thought, which is outside it. (I describe what a practice is here.) So it has the incompetent inside it, the fool is one of (Deleuze's) thought's conceptual personae.

Immanence, however, can only be thought qualitatively if it is outside, like the concept of difference which is outside itself. Stupid would be the repetition of the same. A process AI, trained on discourse in general and the statistical recurrence of the same, is good at—a tool for the extraction of individuation and anything that individuates.

To think quality would mean to think in a way that individuates thought, which thought is individuated by its problem. A problem has everything to do with a quality, it is a certain shade of blue, and nothing to do with the number of times it recurs, even if only once, the quality of a problem lies therein that it is well or badly formulated. To say it this way is however to put the formulation as somehow in relation to the problem and affecting it, an affect as could be felt if such things could be felt, when the quality of an affect is inside and the quality of a percept outside. And outside itself not in space but time.